DONNIE DARKO

Description:Jake Gyllenhaal (October Sky) stars as Donnie, a
borderline-schizophrenic adolescent for whom there is no difference
between the signs and wonders of reality (a plane crash that decimates his
house) and hallucination (a man-sized, reptilian rabbit who talks to him).
Obsessed with the science of time travel and acutely aware of the world
around him, Donnie is isolated by his powers of analysis and the
apocalyptic visions that no one else seems to share.
—
Amazon.com

Early
on in Donnie Darko we see a character reading a Stephen King novel.
This
is a good indication of what is to come: Donnie Darko is the sort of thing
Stephen King might have written before he started regurgitating his old
material ad nauseam, something he has easily done for the past 15 years
or so. That is, if Stephen King grew obsessed with metaphysical issues
regarding what constitutes reality.

The director of Donnie Darko described
his movie as The Catcher in the Rye as written by Philip K. Dick, which
is pretty accurate I suppose. It's about a teenager growing up in the late 1980s (1988 to be exact),
who is warned by five-foot giant bunny rabbit named Frank that the world
will come to an end within the month.

The teenager (the titular Donnie Darko) might be
schizophrenic it is hinted: ominously he stopped taking his medication and
he is seeing a shrink. Is the bunny rabbit (a truly scary figure - not to be
confused with any preconceptions of cuddly bunny rabbits you might have)
real? Is the world really coming to an end? Or is Donnie just loosing it?

Within ten minutes of any movie nowadays one has a pretty good idea of
how it will end. Not so with Donnie Darko, which builds up unbearable
tension slowly and surely. One has a feeling of how it would be resolved,
but isn't exactly sure. It is building up to something, but what exactly
that would be isn't quite clear.

When the end does come around it is unexpected
and, to be honest, a bit of a cop-out. The last movie I saw with such
a frustrating ending was David Lynch's surreal Mulholland Drive. Despite
this, the point remains that unlike most of today's movies, Donnie Darko
is truly unpredictable, weird and gripping. The less one knows about the
plot beforehand the better. Someone, who watched the movie with me, had
only one word to describe it: "bizarre."

Which is probably the reason that
Donnie Darko didn't do particularly
well at the American box office. Director Robert Zemeckis (of Back to
the Future fame, a movie referred to in Donnie Darko coincidentally) recently
admitted in reviews that the trailers for his movies - specifically What
Lies Beneath and Cast Away - gave away the endings because audiences said
they preferred to know beforehand what is going to happen. I suppose this
is the equivalent of ordering a burger at McDonald's: you know what you're
going to get, even if it is bland and unappetising.

If you don't always
want to know what you're going to get and like to be surprised occasionally,
then check out Donnie Darko today: it is quite simply the best science
fiction movie I have seen since 1998's Dark
City, and the best horror
flick since The Others . . .

This movie disappeared without a trace at the American
box office in October last year, which is a shame. Donnie Darko
has all the signs of a cult movie in the making however: the On-line Film
Critics Society nominated it as one of their top 100 sci-fi movies of
all times recently and general Internet buzz is strong.

When people are
talking about this movie years from now the way they are going on about
Blade Runner or Twelve Monkeys today then don't say that I didn't warn
you . . .